Radio Valerie Grove
‘You’ve said that dying will be “the next great adventure”. What exactly did you mean by that?’ Emma Barnett asked the venerable Dame Jane Goodall, 86.
Dame Jane was doubtless nonplussed that her famously sharp interrogator was unfamiliar with this Peter Pan quotation. But ‘What did you mean by that?’ is one of Barnett’s two stock questions. The other is ‘How did that make you feel – losing your job/voice/baby?’ in a thrusting tone, sans warmth or genuine curiosity.
From day one of the Barnett regime, the companionable, good-humoured
Woman’s Hour of Jenni and Jane was transformed into strident soapbox
stuff. It seemed to assemble voices that most grated on the ear – an American woman on the #Metoo movement; Carol Ann Duffy mumbling a poem she’d written, in her usual morose monotone.
Respite came from the Radio 3 presenter and musician Clemency Burton-hill, giving Woman’s Hour her first interview since her brain haemorrhage a year ago. Addressed as Clemmie, she tried to accommodate Barnett’s persistent ‘How did that FEEL?’S. She refrained from replying, ‘I was unconscious – how do you think that feels?’
Instead, she struggled to enunciate how she had set about getting her mind, speech and intelligence back: ‘You just start at the be-gin-ning. It is not a lin-e-ar pro-gress-ion. I hate the word “im-paired”. There is … surely … a better … word.’
She gave a graphic account of having been, in her coma, offered two choices of taking the easy way (death) or the hard way, which is what she is taking. She is learning to speak again, in tandem with her younger son, aged two, word by word. ‘My boys,’ she said, ‘are the premier reason.’
I fell on Fergal Keane’s three-part series, How the Irish Shaped Britain. The soft brogues of Keane, Professor Roy Foster, novelist Colm Tóibín and others told tales of Irish migration and the progression from prejudice and caricature to total infiltration of the English establishment.
There were passages from Thomas Moore, Thackeray’s Pendennis, Sheridan, Wilde, Yeats, Shaw (recruited by the BBC to teach the English how to speak) and Macneice. There were welcome musical interludes – even navvies’ terrible ballads. All documentary subjects should be leavened by music, as in Radio 3’s Words and Music slot.
Tim Harford’s invaluable More or Less gained further popularity with its producer Kate Lamble’s clever dig at Penny Mordaunt and Michael Gove and their slippery, false promises to the fishing industry. She wrote a brilliant parody of a sea shanty: ‘That’s not how numbers go! A fraction of a fraction is less, you know!’ sung by Jordan Dunbar.
Hard on the heels of In Our Time on The Great Gatsby came a documentary on Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald’s (and Hemingway’s) laudable editor.
‘The book belongs to the author,’ Perkins declared. But have you looked at the acknowledgements in a novel lately? Novelists, like actors getting awards, now shower thanks. Not just on editors but also on informants, agents, researchers, helpful first-draft readers, mums, chums etc.
Richard Osman in The Thursday Murder Club wrote, ‘A book is such a team effort’ – which made me hurl it aside with great force, as Dorothy Parker advised. Yes, his bestseller is amusing tosh – currently aired on Radio 4 – but he claims to have needed about 200 elves to help write it!
The bestseller list is chronically stuffed with self-help books with key phrases like ‘change your life/ life philosophy/ confidence/ mental-health advice/ lasting happiness/ principles for a responsible and meaningful life…’
I advise readers of such books to turn on Radio 4 on a Sunday morning whenever Canon Angela Tilby is speaking her habitual wise words. On Epiphany, acknowledging the ‘shock and dislocation’ of COVID, she said, ‘Our greatest contemporary heresy is to think it’s normal – or even a universal right – to live in a pain-free, stress-free zone where we are simply owed security, comfort, happiness.’
Lie back and learn.